On 1/14/2011 2:00 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:
Philipp Thomas wrote:
(and I assume also eSata drives plugged in to a USB/eSata port) And here you err. These are two electrically different ports that just happen to share one connection. To the machine these are different
On Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:44:30 -0800, Marc Chamberlin wrote: ports so a BIOS option for external USB will most certainly not mean a drive connected as eSATA. These combined ports are mostly meant for drives that connect as eSATA but draw their power from the USB bus as the eSATA designers totally forgot about that.
My experience shows that eSATA drives are enumerated like internal drives so you still have to find out the device that gets assigned to the disk. Philipp has said much more clearly what I meant :)
The BIOS is configure so that the boot sequence is first from a CD/DVD drive, then from a USB drive, then from the internal hard drive. In my limited experience, when there is a BIOS choice of "internal hard drive" or the like, then there is a separate BIOS choice for the order in which the internal disks are to be considered, perhaps buried on a different page. It seems likely that your esata port is somewhere in
In addition Marc wrote: that menu, and is either not selected or is selected after your internal disk.
Cheers, Dave Thanks everyone for all the advice and help offers! Much appreciated... I have managed to get openSuSE11.3 installed on my external eSata drive and thought I would report back with some info I have found out....
First of all, apologies for not understanding the difference between eSata and USB, the port on my laptop is a dual port for both, and I had no idea as to the reasons why... Thanks Philip for enlightening me, never would have thought that the designers of eSata would have screwed up an not supplied power!!! That is plain bizarre.... Second, the menus and procedures supplied with the installation disk, for setting up GRUB and bootloaders, are IMHO, extremely difficult to grok and understand. For a non-expert, such as myself, I feel extremely uncomfortable using these menus as they simply do not guide me in a way that I feel safe. There are, for example, various options selectable by checkboxes (not toggles that prevent illegal combinations) of where to install the boot loaders - MBR, Root partition, Boot Partition, yada yada and underneath this one must establish drive order without any real model being presented as to what the effects of all these choices will be. One can check more than one option or even all of em!! Dunno what would happen if I did and was too afraid to find out! I kinda think a rework with a more graphical presentation showing pictorially just what is going to get installed where would be far more understandable, if anyone cares to improve this... Something akin to what most disk partitioning tools do... That said, I finally managed to come across an old post on setting up on a dual boot system that made a lot of sense and was EASY to follow. Simply remove the internal drive from the laptop entirely! No way one can screw up it's MBR or anything else on it then. And install to the external hard drive as normally done using the defaults... One can fix up the boot menu later to make it dual boot and not have to worry about doing things wrong, or use those difficult to understand menus! I LIKE nice safe easy solutions!!!! Third, and I should think this will make a LOT of Linux users hopping mad, it does me! After I got openSuSE installed on my external eSata drive, I discovered that the ONLY way for me to boot it is to catch, during the initial power on sequence, the F12 function key prompt and activate the Boot disk selection menu that comes with my Dell Vostro 3700 laptop. (this is done at the same time one would press the F2 function key to bring up the BIOS system menu.) The BIOS itself does NOT support using an eSata drive as an option in it's boot priority menu, and as pointed out to me, USB is NOT the same as eSata, so selecting a high priority for USB disk drives will not work.) I talked to a Dell support person, who like me was initially surprised that the BIOS does not support the eSata drive as a bootable disk. He went off and did some research on it and came back with a reason which Linux users are gonna "love"!!! Apparently Microsoft has forced Dell into a license agreement and I will quote him - "Not booting from the e sata is a Microsoft imposed limitation to prevent licensing conflicts." I have not researched this further but if true then my reaction is HUMP! If anyone knows anything about such a restriction, I would be curious as to why it has not been challenged... No where on Dells website, or in their specs was I told (or should say - could find information) about this when I bought my laptop from them, and I would guess/think this restriction from Microsoft would violate fair usage laws. It should make eSata disk drive manufactures hopping mad also.. So IMHO Microsoft has apparently thrown yet another hurdle against Linux... Perhaps this should be noted on openSuSE's website and in the installation instructions? Marc Chamberlin.... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org